A sensible null hypothesis for consumer products is that the user doesn't care about your product, doesn't have time to use it, doesn't understand its purpose, will skip any onboarding tutorials, won't read UI copy, will forget about it after signing up or installing it...

...won't invite others to use it, will use the password reset flow to sign in Every Single Time, would rather use TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or Netflix instead of your product, doesn’t know about the existence of that superb feature that took your team 2 years to build...

...will disallow push notifications, will ignore or unsubscribe from your marketing emails, will not upgrade to the paid version even if rationally it seems worth it, will let the subscription lapse, will readily switch to a shiny new competing product.

All that to say: consumer product management is fucking hard.

And we haven't even talked about the non-user side of it:
making sense of conflicting experiment results, mediating 100s of different opinions on what to build & how, tensions between scaling infra & building features, being at the mercy of platform gatekeepers, and on and on...

Thanks @shalmanese for asking the question about B2C product management in response to my tweet on the sensible null hypothesis for B2B product management. https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1270905866988863489

What else should be included in the null hypothesis for consumer / B2C products?

Share your thoughts and experiences below.

Oh, if it isn't clear, none of the aspects of the null hypothesis are the user's fault. Good consumer prod mgmt is about understanding that users have a lot going on and by default don't want to engage with your product. And it's the PM & team's job to deal with that reality.